3 Answers
3

I don't know. I cannot think of any situation where '(foo) would be turned into (quote foo) since it's actually tyhe same as (quote (foo)) (the ' symbol is typically a reader macro that reads the next sexp and returns it surrounded by a call to the quote special form).

In PicoLisp, '(foo) is equivalent to (quote foo) and 'foo is equivalent to (quote . foo).

I didn't understand that paragraph either. It's conceivable that Yegge was referring to PicoLisp (in the context of porting between Lisp dialects), or he could have been referring to a bug or corner case in a CL or Scheme implementation (though none that I am aware of.)